The Man Who Loved Cat Burgling
By day, Mitch Shaw was a colorless computer nerd. By night, he teamed up with his sweetheart, Jennifer Dolan, to rob Dallas’ rich and famous of their jewelry.
(Page 3 of 5)
The only problem for Mitch was that he couldn’t find a good wheelman he could trust. Initially, he used a couple of buddies from the neighborhood, but they tended to panic and flee if they saw police officers, forcing Mitch to make his getaways on foot through back yards and alleys. Mitch knew that if he was ever going to move up to the elite Dallas neighborhoods, where he would face private security guards and regular police patrols, then he was going to need a wheelman who not only was composed enough to wait for him as long as was necessary at the pickup locations but also could handle any questions from the cops and, if Mitch was being pursued, would be willing to floor the accelerator once Mitch was in the car and make a run for it.
But instead of finding a professional, Mitch made a decision that must have made the man in the neighborhood shake his head in disbelief. He asked Jennifer to join him.
Perhaps he thought it was such a romantic notion: the two of them embarking on a great adventure, stealing jewels from rich people who probably had the insurance to cover their losses. Or maybe he thought that if he and Jennifer created a life together as criminals, she’d be less likely to go out with her friends to meet other guys. Whatever the reason, he had made a far more brilliant choice than maybe even he realized. With her big hair, her always-skillful makeup job, and her manicured nails tapping the steering wheel as she listened to rap music, Jennifer would drive around a neighborhood after dropping Mitch off, oohing and aahing at the mansions, and always circling back to the pickup spot right on time. In our conversations Jennifer remained coy about many aspects of her relationship with Mitch, but when I asked her if she had been scared about becoming Mitch’s wheelman, she gave me an almost nostalgic smile. “Oh, no, it was so exciting. And Mitch always told me it would be so easy.” I realized later that what Mitch had said to Jennifer was almost exactly what Clyde had said to Bonnie in the 1967 movie version of their lives. “Don’t worry about nothing,” Clyde proclaimed about the bank robbery he was planning. “This is going to be the easiest thing in the world.” Compared to his more infamous predecessor, however, Mitch was very, very cautious. Because he hated violence, he refused to carry a gun—he used to tell Jennifer that he wished there were laws banning guns—and he refused to burglarize a home unless the occupants were gone, so there would be no possibility of his getting shot. He and Jennifer would drive through a neighborhood night after night, studying a house, looking to see if certain lights always remained on (a giveaway that the homeowners were out of town). He’d get out of the car and circle the house on foot, peering through windows to see if the beds were made; he’d even peek through mail slots to see if mail was scattered on the floor.
Occasionally, he’d knock a hole in the window and then retreat, sitting in a dark corner of the yard to see if police officers would come or if a light would turn on inside the house. If he heard a phone inside the house ringing soon after making his opening in the window, he’d leave, his assumption being that he unknowingly had tripped an alarm and that the security company was calling the homeowners. And once inside, he never ventured past the bathroom or closets if he thought a motion detector was on in the hallway.
Yet for all his caution, Mitch could be almost incomprehensibly gutsy. Police officers almost never encounter professional jewel thieves anymore, because stealing jewels takes time and time increases the burglar’s risk exponentially. The typical burglar today smashes through a door or window, grabs whatever portable merchandise he can carry, and then lumbers away. In dollars, the average value of the haul in a residential burglary in Dallas totals no more than $3,000. But Mitch was unique. He went after only good jewelry (he usually left the costume jewelry behind), and he loved going after well-known Dallas residents. Based on conversations with Jennifer, the police believe that he burglarized the mansion of restaurant entrepreneur Norman Brinker and his wife, Nancy, twice in one month in 1992 while they were away at their Florida home, and he broke into the home of local television anchor Clarice Tinsley in 1993 when she was out of town. On that occasion he not only took her jewels but also grabbed as a special present for Jennifer a glittery sequin-encrusted denim jacket that Tinsley had purchased at a Dallas AIDS benefit. The police also believe that in 1996, after Dallas socialite Sharon McCutchin had been photo- graphed for the High Profile section of the Dallas Morning News wearing a gigantic diamond ring and gold earrings the size of miniature football helmets, Mitch broke into her and her husband’s Mediterranean-style villa in the Preston Hollow estates area, getting away with some of her best pieces.
In 1993 the Dallas police department set up a task force to investigate the North Dallas jewelry heists and added extra patrols in the neighborhoods where the burglaries were taking place. They got close to Mitch a couple of times, but they never knew it. Once, just as Mitch found two $100,000 diamond-studded Rolexes and $10,000 in cash during one burglary, he heard a siren coming down a street at the back of the house. Sensing his escape route was cut off, he quickly changed into an all-white tennis outfit he had found in the closet, stuffed the watches and cash down the front of his underwear, dashed around to the front of the house, and then trotted right down the middle of the street, as if he were one of the neighbors out for an early-evening jog. No one looked twice at him: Who would have expected a burglar to be dressed in tennis whites?
On another occasion he was inside a North Dallas home when he heard the sound of an approaching police helicopter along with the sirens of squad cars. With the jewels in hand, he headed out of the house, raced to the next-door neighbor’s yard, threw off his clothes except for his boxer shorts, and jumped into the swimming pool. As the police helicopter flew over him, Mitch swam back and forth, back and forth—still, to use the words of his stepmother, the little dolphin. The cops in the helicopter mistook him for the homeowner out for an evening swim—and flew off to look elsewhere. As more cops converged on the neighborhood, a smiling Jennifer maneuvered her way past them in the Tercel, parked at the pickup spot, and waited until a wet-haired Mitch leaped into the car.
If the police are to be believed, Mitch was doing at least a dozen scores a year by the mid-nineties. In some instances, of course, he found little jewelry. Most wealthy people in Dallas keep their best jewels in safe-deposit boxes at banks or in safes hidden away in their homes. In one burglary, however, when Mitch did find a small safe that he couldn’t open, he lugged it out of the bathroom window and then carried it as far as he could down the street and into some bushes before tiring, returning later that night with Jennifer to pick it up. Still, even when he did find a stash, his fence would pay him only a fraction of what the jewelry was worth, claiming he had his own exorbitant costs to have the jewels cut up to be resold. Mitch reportedly received $5,000 to $20,000 for a heist, a few of which brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gold and diamonds.
Yet Mitch didn’t seem to care about becoming rich. “He never spent a dime on himself,” said one of his half sisters. “He never bought clothes, and I think he had just one coat. At the apartment, the closet was full of Jennifer’s clothes, and I think Mitch had one drawer full of stuff, mostly T-shirts.” Jennifer did tell me that if Mitch suddenly showed up with a large wad of cash, he’d spend it mostly on her, taking her to get her nails and hair done, buying her new outfits, and then ending the day with dinner at Bennigan’s or, for a real treat, at the revolving restaurant inside the gigantic lighted ball at the top of Reunion Tower, which looms over downtown Dallas. Sometimes she’d wear some of the better pieces of jewelry that Mitch had acquired. Mitch was so in love with Jennifer that he once let her help him paint one of his Picasso imitations; when they were finished, he signed the painting “Dolan Shaw” and put it on a wall in their living room, right next to the bookshelf filled with a fish-shaped onyx sculpture that Jennifer’s mother had given them.
Mitch had plans to go legitimate someday—he did start a company called WebCanDo to create Web sites for small businesses—yet he never could shake the thrill of the heist. “I think he realized he had a gift for this kind of work,” a police detective told me. “He found a real joy in being able to do something few other people could do.” On Sunday afternoons, he and Jennifer would walk hand-in-hand through open houses for newly built mansions, in part to see how they were built and where the new homeowners would keep their jewelry. And inevitably, he began having Jennifer drive him past the Simmons mansion, with its off-duty DPS officer in the driveway and a trained German shepherd guard dog named Titus in the back yard.
My Library
